Elections Matter: US LNG Resumes Its Place of Global Dominance

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum held a joint appearance in South Louisiana Thursday to tout the restart of the growth of America’s liquefied natural gas industry.

The event celebrated the kickoff of a planned $18 billion expansion of the existing Plaquemines Parrish LNG export facility operated by Venture Global. It also served to symbolize the end of what was frankly one of the dumbest policy actions ever invoked by executive order – Joe Biden’s “pause” on permitting for new LNG export infrastructure.

Reversed by President Donald Trump on Day 1 of his second term in office, Biden invoked the year-long pause in January, 2024 on the flimsiest of pretenses, a preposterous claim by anti-natural gas activist researchers that US LNG emissions exceed those of coal-fired power plants. Worse, that claim was not made in findings of a peer-reviewed scientific study, but in an early “preview” of a study that fell apart on close inspection.

The unpleasant task of defending this dumb policy action fell largely on the shoulders of Biden’s hapless Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, who assured the attendees of the annual CERAWeek conference in Houston last March that the “pause” would be “in the rearview mirror” when they met again in 2025. That prediction turned out to be accurate, but not due to any action taken by her or Biden. Instead, Granholm did her best to hype the DOE’s own study when it was released in November, making claims about its findings in a letter leaked to the New York Times the day before that turned out to not be accurate.